Soon more vampire attacks were reported all across the Hapsburg Monarchy, kicking off a mass vampire hysteria that raged through eastern Europe for the next two decades. Suspected vampires were hunted down, graves were dug up, and suspicious corpses were staked, until the Hapsburg empress Maria Theresa finally put a stop to the whole crazy business by passing strict laws prohibiting the exhumation of graves and the desecration of dead bodies.

The Eighteenth-Century Vampire Controversy (as this strange slice of history became known) went on to inspire a number of famous German poems — including “The Vampire” by Heinrich August Ossenfelder and “The Bride of Corinth” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — which were huge hits in their English translations. Poetry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a much bigger deal than it is today — everyone read poetry (everyone in the literate classes, that is), and the most popular poets had fans just as avid as Stephenie Meyer’s or Neil Gaiman’s are now. The most popular of them all, the English poet Lord Byron, left a trail of swooning readers in his wake, as mesmerized by his dark good looks and his scandalous life as by his poetry. Although he was not the first English poet to put vampires into verse (that credit belongs to Robert Southey), it was Byron’s rock-star fame and glamour that gave vampires a new glamour of their own: first when he used vampire lore in his epic poem “The Giaour” in 1813, and then, a few years later, when he conceived a horror story about an English aristocrat turned vampire. That vampire is the great-great-granddaddy of the vampires we know and love today.

Like everything in Lord Byron’s life, the story had a curious twist.